I don’t, what I mean is that the inclusion of the MWL has put Faust in (almost) every deck. Any complaint about Faust being too dominant is pretty directly a result of the MWL’s attempt to shake up the meta.
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I’m ok with faust as a card in of itself. It seems more about it being in the faction that houses the counters to its counters.
I don’t see adjusted+wyldside as an issue. Yes it’s powerful but there are mechanics for blowing up resources. If they aren’t “good” due to perception or reality then either perception or reality needs to improve.
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Sure, I can agree with this too. The MWL cannot really be considered a success in any terms yet, except in the diversification of Shaper. We may see things level out during the Mumbad Cycle, but it’s also totally possible we won’t.
Given that, what more harm could it possibly do to throw another anarch card on the MWL? It’s already very poorly, and artificially shaken up, how would anything be worse?
I voted ban but I think ban is the wrong approach. However, putting it on the MWL will do very little I think. Reg-ass Anarchs have plenty of influence to play around with it and Noise losing another clone chip is not going to dent him that much. Non-anarch rigs generally only run 1 copy of Faust so 1 extra influence is no big deal. If the survey choice existed, I would vote a mix of MWL and more hate cards in the near term.
You’re right on the money. Compare to Crypsis.
0 Influence
Costs 5
Strength 0
Takes 1 action to interact with 1 ICE or trash Crypsis
1/1 credit to strength
1/1 credit to break.
Super time and cash intensive. Basically unplayable at this point in time because it’s too slow. It’s 0 influence? In Anarch Faust is 0 influence. It’s cheaper and as fast as you’re able to draw cards. Luckily every faction has a way to turn a click into more than 1 card.
Let’s not even talk about Overmind or Knight. Atman was the most comparable as far as impact on the meta, but that wasn’t obvious to anyone until someone won nationals with it as the only breaker. It isn’t anywhere as fast as Faust because you have to set up and facechecking is a lot more dangerous.
Can’t they just stop making AI breakers?
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Argument’s a bit specious; It could be reasoned that people were playing things before that they were comfortable with, they were forced off of their comfort cards and when they reexamined the card pool picked the most powerful thing in it. All of that attention generated by the meta shake up can’t be ignored, its possible the pre MWL meta simply hadn’t thought on Faust well enough.
We could pretty easily figure this out by trying to build faust decks in the vein of the new stuff to play against the old corp decks and see how we do.
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I’m not a great player so maybe it’s different at the top, but while my initial impression of Faust was that I hated it, I haven’t found it egregious to play against since. I started slotting Swordsman and multi-sub ICE, and I don’t remember feeling like I’ve had a game where Faust was the reason I lost.
Honestly, I hate Yog.0 more because it’s the only icebreaker that incurs 0 cost to break ICE.
The argument that secret tier one decks are hidden away, undiscovered because the best players in the game are actually secretly worse than players who claim their pet deck is really good, is an argument has never sat well with me. The best players always find the best decks. If we throw away numbers and tournament results in arguments about what’s good, then arguments devolve to “well I think this deck is good and you can’t disprove me”, which doesn’t get anybody anywhere.
Truth is, numbers matter, and it’s not a wild statement to say that if there were some tier one decks with Faust in them then they would have been represented at big tournaments. The common counter-argument is “ah, well what if people dismiss them because of the mystical Netrunner hivemind that makes people bad at card evaluation?” To that, I respond with countless examples throughout the game’s history of decks that have appeared and competitive players have picked up on, Butchershop and DLR are great examples from the recent past.
The only way to analyse the meta is to analyse deck performance at large tournaments or we throw all reason out of the window. By ignoring the data we have about the meta when talking about the meta, it’s impossible to say that any card/deck/ID is bad in the current metagame which thereby makes it impossible to say that any deck is good. Why should we ignore the vast quantities of data that inform us about the very thing we’re discussing?
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But, Faust was in half the Worlds top 8 though?
Are you and gumonshoe talking about Faust being secretly good even months before that?
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It was, but a lot of the decks that are being discussed here (the reg ass Anarch decks that use Faust as a breaker for example) were not present at Worlds. There are new types of Faust decks that are seeing a lot of play now, and decks in similar veins were not present at Worlds or in other competitive tournaments pre-MWL. The reason is, unexcitingly, because they were’t a competitive choice back then.
The card was present, though in very different decks that those that gumOnShoe alluded to. There’s no doubt that Noise and DLR Val were good decks at Worlds, or that Faust was a good card.
I just feel anything other than Anarch is underpowered at the moment. I feel it’s hard to win as a Runner when not playing Anarch, and I feel it’s hard to win as a Corp when playing against Anarch.
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I always find myself agreeing with everything @Xenasis says in these types of threads.
I cannot believe people are complaining about a powerful card. Why would anyone bring up Crypsis? I’m sure it was playable when the game was young but it’s been pitifully below the curve for years. If Faust was as weak as @spags suggested version, it would be an embarrassment.
For God’s sake, we need more powerful cards, not less. If the community is going to complain about strong cards the designers are going to be too conservative. We already have piles of cards that are too weak to ever play. Please don’t whine about Faust; it just means we will get more bad cards.
For what it’s worth, I would not have swapped to Faust if not for the MWL. I’m not saying the power wasn’t there, but classic L4J never failed me; however, I could no longer play both NRE and Clone Chips, and the deck couldn’t function. I think the prevalence of Faust was largely catalyzed by the MWL and Noise’s success with it.
Parting shot: it’s as if people want the Corp game to be easy. They want to score behind a Wall of Static because the poor Anarch can’t find their Corroder. Too bad; maybe Corp game needs to be brutally difficult for awhile. It’s not a bad thing. Corp still has all the hidden info, upgrades, and ICE is getting better and better. Seems fair that Runners would get better too.
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I can’t help but disagree that the MWL is to blame for Faust’s ubiquity. Prior to the MWL, basically every winning deck was PPVP or included Faust. Adoption wasn’t immediate, but that was definitely the trend. The MWL just amplified that by taking away a lot of people’s comfort decks, and making them realize that this powerful card exists. Even Good Stuff Anarchs were using it as support, and it fit nicely with the redundancy.
That being said, I don’t think Faust is imbalanced in a vacuum. If it wasn’t in the faction that had the ideal answers to all of its weaknesses, it’d be much more reasonable. Of all of Faust’s ideal support cards, only LARLA isn’t Anarch. Parasite, D4v1d, Breakfast Club, Mimic, Yog, Sucker. I still think a Criminal Faust (maybe at 3 inf instead of 2) would have been a fine and healthy addition to the game. Decouple it from all its favorite support. In a brighter timeline, maybe it was even an Apex or Adam card.
As for what should be done? I don’t know. I like the card on a lot of levels, and banning it seems like a bad idea. I like the idea of more powerful cards, instead of keeping everyone down.
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I tend to agree with those who feel that Wyldside + Pancakes is the really powerful piece here, more than Faust on his own.
You could view Wyldside + Pancakes + Faust + D4v1d as a four-card-combo, and perhaps conclude “so what, there are other four-card-combos that are super powerful” but the difference here is that it’s a self-enabling combo.
Playing MaxX makes it that much easier to find your Wyldside fast, and as soon as it’s played it makes it that much easier to find your Chronotype faster, then it’s super easy to find a Faust. At this point, the choices you made to get your combo set up (as a Shaper might choose SMCs or Test Run or Personal Workshop or something) are still in play and have become part of the combo itself.
If you managed to assemble only part of the combo, it’s still really powerful. Even having found only Wyldside and Faust, if the corp sees you have Faust and start each turn with 8 cards to feed him, they know it’s already almost impossible to fully protect a remote.
But I feel that you can’t just evaluate “Wyldside costs a click and gives me two cards” on its own and say “well two cards is worth two clicks, or 4 credits” or something, without considering the fact that it accelerates its own combos…
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Just build your deck to beat it, its not that difficult, when the whole runner field is doing the same thing. Instead of focusing on gear checks focus on big ice, lots of subs and lots of damage in your deck. They all run levy so pack chronos project. Pack snares. Pack big ice with lots of subs that will cost 3+ cards or 2 david counters to get through each, wraparound, archer, little engine, archangel, assassin, komianu, tsurugi to name a few. Hell if you know the runner has gone all in on faust, you can even pack things like tl;dr, chum or inazuma which all give you ridiculous rez:cost ratios compared to faust, and pretty much act as end the run in each case lest you have so ething nasty behind them.
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Have fun paying for all that vs Siphon MaxX
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Netrunner is full of targeted counter cards, so you can always tweak your deck to do well against specific popular cards. The question is at what point is it unhealthy that decks are spending X card slots to punish a particular playstyle.
I don’t think MWL specifically made Faust more popular, but rather it made Anarch (and thus Faust) more popular. MWL makes the lines between factions more strongly defined by reducing available influence. It just so happens that right now Anarch has a good fraction of the most desired cards, and if you’re playing Anarch there’s little reason not to play Faust.
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I think it’s strange that people are comparing Faust’s ubiquity to Sure Gamble’s. Nobody thinks econ events are the most exciting part of the game, or that they need a ton of equally balanced variety. People ARE used to a variety of icebreakers being used, and it’s a bummer when that variety goes down a lot. Wondering whether you picked the right breaker suite for the server you’re about to run is a big part of the thrill of the game… and if you’re 95% sure that you picked the right rig with Faust-Mimic-D4vid it’s a lot less thrilling.
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Whiz Cutlery deck was doing awesomely for me Pre-MWL as well. Obviously corps were stronger so it wasn’t the ball-crusher it is now, but the deck was very very strong. No one else was really trying it because they already knew Noise/DLR/Kate were strong enough.
There is pretty much no reason to play another Anarch rig over Faust. That’s why it has to go.
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I think errata is the answer:
“Whenever you use Faust to break a subroutine on a piece of ICE, you may visit Stimhack.com and read about people complaining about Faust. If you do not, trash Faust.”
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